Kill Now, Pay Later (Hard Case Crime (Mass Market Paperback))

by Robert Terrall

  “It’s not clear at all,” I said. “She rushed you. Hold on for a minute. I haven’t spent all the retainer yet, so in my dumb way I still consider you a client. Did Dick set the fire that burned down the recreation building?”

  I listened to telephone noises for a moment. Finally he said, “That was looked into at the time. It was established that—”

  “Who did the looking?” I said.

  “The insurance people. The volunteer fire company. The State Police. I assure you that if there had been the least shred of evidence—”

  “That kind of evidence is hard to find, Mr. Pope. That’s one of the bad things about package insurance. If the package is big enough, there’s a tendency to settle small claims without being too picky. I hear that Dick started going to a psychiatrist after the fire. Was it connected?”

  “Not in that sense. There were disturbing things about the party besides the fact that it ended with a fire. If I’d been convinced that Dick deliberately started a fire in which someone was killed, I wouldn’t have stopped at sending him to an analyst. I would have had him committed. Will you get to the point, please?”

  “I have to ask about the money in the safe. You told me something about a tax case. That was easy to check. There’s no tax case, although I ought to warn you that I stirred them up and they’re going to take a look at your back returns. Was there some other reason you didn’t want to tell the cops about the money, or wasn’t there any money?”

  “I see no reason to continue this,” he said. “I mentioned a possible tax prosecution because it was something you could understand. At that time I wanted an investigation. I now have the answers to some of the questions that were bothering me, and I want the investigation to stop.”

  “You can always hang up on me, Mr. Pope.”

  After a moment, when he remained on the line, I said, “I hear Dick has been short of cash lately.”

  “Who told you that?” he said sharply.

  “Nobody had to tell me. It’s in the air. He used to drive a Ferrari, now he drives a Mercury. He’s been borrowing money from people who don’t have it to lend.”

  Pope said reluctantly, “The boy was idiotic enough to get into a dice game run by a professional gambler. The gambler now holds certain IOUs. I say it was idiotic. I don’t say it was out of character.”

  “How much does it add up to?”

  “Twenty thousand dollars. You’re right, I should hang up. That’s what Anna advised. Telling about it only makes it worse. That’s why I kept money at home —I never knew what mad thing Dick would do next. Signing IOU’s to a professional crook! There I drew the line. I told him he could expect no help from me. In the end I probably would have paid, I always do. But he had been threatened with a beating, and I thought if I let them give it to him perhaps it would teach him something. I won’t appeal to your sympathy. I doubt if you have any. But he’s my son! I’ve done what I could with him. I know it hasn’t been enough. His mother—lived in her own world. When Dick was young I had no time.” He said suddenly, “The hell with you, Gates. Go to hell. Go to hell.”

  And he slammed down the phone. I looked at the phone at my end, then got a dial tone and phoned Sonia Petrofsky to ask if I could come in and look at her morgue clippings.

  “I’ve been expecting you,” she said. “I’ll leave them on my desk.”

  I phoned Grand Central to get a list of departures for White Plains. Few people wanted to travel in that direction at this time of day. If I missed the next train I would have to wait another hour. Nevertheless I finished my coffee and smoked a cigar before I moved. I took a taxi uptown, spent fifteen minutes in Sonia’s office with the clippings, and caught the White Plains local after it had already begun to move. I had bought a morning paper, but I had enough on my mind without worrying about the bad news from other parts of the world. I looked out at the scenery, which wasn’t impressive, and thought about all the people who had been lying to me for the last day and a half. In White Plains I gave Anna’s address to a cab driver. My Buick was waiting in front of her apartment house. It was locked, but I had an extra key taped inside the fender below the gas hatch.

  Twenty minutes later I was in Prosper. Before I talked to anybody I wanted to find out more about that fire.

  The one-truck fire house was locked up all around. An old man who had nothing better to do watched me try the doors.

  “Salesman?” he said.

  “I’m looking for the chief,” I said.

  “He’s more than likely down at the store.”

  He pointed to a hardware-fuel-and-feed store at the other end of the main street. It stood on a slight rise, like the castle of a baron who levies tribute on the surrounding country. In a sense this was fitting, for most of the furnaces around here burned oil. It had its own rail siding and storage tanks, an accretion of sheds and warehouses, and looked considerably more prosperous than the small bank across the street. I parked beside two school buses, went into the hardware section and asked a lady where I could find the fire chief.

  “He had to go to a funeral, but he ought to be back any minute,” she said. “Can I help you?”

  I told her I’d wait. A hardware store that keeps up with new gadgets is a pleasant place to waste time on a summer morning, and before I had been there long I had bought a combination cork-puller, bottle-opener and can-opener, which could probably also be used for pulling teeth.

  “There he is,” the clerk said. Looking out the display window, I saw a heavyset man coming out of the bank. “I didn’t think it would take long. He wasn’t going to the cemetery.”

  The man crossed the street and came in, loosening his tie. He had short legs and a chest like one of his own kegs. He took off his dark coat, hung it on a wooden hanger and started rolling his sleeves.

  “Did anybody take care of you?”

  “I was waiting to see you,” I said. “I want to ask you about a fire. My name is Ben Gates.”

  “Gates,” he said. “I was reading about you. You mean the fire at the Popes’? What about it?”

  “How did it start?”

  He had stopped rolling up his sleeve when I told him who I was. Now he finished that sleeve and started on the other.

  “We turned in a report on it. There’s a copy at the fire house, anyway there ought to be. We had to certify it. What’s your angle, Gates?”

  “My angle?” I said politely.

  “You know what I mean. The insurance had a man on it for a week or more. What was his name again?—Hamilton. I thought the thing was supposed to be closed.”

  “I’m working for Mr. Pope, not the insurance company.”

  “What’s he want to rake it up for? You’d think he’d be the last—”

  He looked around. The clerk had gone into an office and I could hear a typewriter working. He lowered his voice. “Because at the time there were these rumors around that the fire was of incendiary origin.”

  A man in jeans and an OD Shirt, with a hairline mustache and half-circles of coal dust on his lower eyelids, came in by a side door.

  “Here’s Al,” the chief said. “He’ll tell you the same. He was driving that night. They collected on the insurance, so why not leave it alone?”

  “The man who was shot the other night used to be in business with the projectionist,” I said. “Pattberg, the man who died in the fire. If there’s any connection Mr. Pope wants to know about it. You probably know the law on this better than I do. If somebody set that fire, couldn’t he be slammed for manslaughter as well as for arson?”

  “I’ve heard people argue it could be second-degree murder.”

  “So naturally you were pretty careful about what you said in your report.”

  “Damn right we were careful.” He came out in front of the counter and parked one meaty hip. He felt for a cigarette. “People are going to gossip about a thing like this, it’s human nature. And one of the things the Nosy Parkers have been saying is that we leaned over backward because Pop
e showers down to the party coffers every other year. After the fire he made the Volunteer Company a present of a two-way radio, which is where he made a tactical mistake in my opinion. It made the talk flare up all over again. What it all comes down to is this, and I’ve probably been through this rigamarole a couple of hundred times. We’re firemen one night a week when we drill, and sometimes on Sundays when we take and wash the equipment. We march in the parades, and once in a blue moon we get an actual conflagration. Unless it’s a chimney or brush or something on that order, usually all we can do is stand around and watch it burn. I manage a fuel and hardware business here. Al drives a coal truck for me. It’s the insurance man you’re going to depend on. He’s the expert. It’s to his company’s financial advantage to prove the fire was set. And his report was unanimous. The fire began in the projection booth, more than likely from a dropped cigarette.”

  “Wasn’t there a kind of explosion?”

  “According to the eyewitnesses.” Al, on a nearby counter, stirred and half-grinned. “Now it’s a fact that the eyewitnesses were three-quarters or more looped, but you wouldn’t think they could all be mistaken like that. And that’s the way films would go up, with a boom.”

  “It was out of control by the time you got there?”

  “Was it out of control! It was a still night, and those flames were shooting up a hundred feet straight in the air. What we did, we put out our fire lines and so on, and we damped down the roofs of the other buildings. And, as I say, we watched it burn.”

  “Not to mention that we watched the eyewitnesses,” Al said.

  “Yeah,” the chief said, “that was quite some party the boys and girls had been having.”

  “How many other companies answered the alarm?” I said.

  “We had two more before the night was over. But we saw right away there wasn’t any use rousting a lot of hard-working people out of their beds.”

  “How many from your company made it?”

  “Just about everybody, in due time. I beat the engine personally, and how many others would you say, Al? Three or four?”

  “About.”

  “And when did Hamilton get there?”

  “The following morning. As soon as the ashes were cool he stirred them around and made tests and I don’t know what all. They have ways of telling.”

  The phone rang in the office. The clerk put her head out of the door.

  “Your brother on the phone, Mr. Minturn. Want to call him back?”

  Chapter 15

  “No, I’ll take it,” the chief said.

  As he went into the office another driver came in from outside. He was young and clean and red-haired, with the shy manner and nice smile of workingmen painted by Norman Rockwell.

  “Rusty,” Al said, smiling reminiscently. “Talking about the big fire. Rusty’s wife belongs to the ladies’ auxiliary,” he explained. “When she showed up with the rest of the ladies to serve us hot coffee and doughnuts, naturally she looked all over for her husband. But no Rusty.”

  “I wish you guys would lay off,” Rusty said. “I was around. Just because she didn’t see me right away—”

  Al chortled. “And were you lucky she didn’t see you right away. A little hefty, that doll, but in the right places. I wouldn’t complain about getting a piece of that myself.”

  “Goddam it, Al! Will you cut it out?”

  “Minturn,” I said thoughtfully. “Is his brother the state trooper?”

  “Oh, yes,” Al said. “Important man. Without him there’s a question if New York State could get through the rest of the week.”

  “Which one drives the Pontiac?”

  “That’s the chief, why?”

  “I just wondered. I guess I’ve got everything I need. Tell him I couldn’t wait.”

  I started for the door. Minturn called from the office, “Gates!”

  I tapped my watch, going through a pantomime of being late for an appointment, and kept going.

  “Al!” the chief called. “Hang onto him.”

  Al swung off the counter and stepped into my path. His thumbs were hooked into his broad belt and he was smiling lazily, as though he couldn’t stop thinking of the crazy wet-haired girls at Dick Pope’s party.

  “Hang onto me?” I said. “What’s the matter with him?”

  Minturn came out of the office. “My brother’s in the troopers, Gates. When I mentioned I was talking to you he practically busted my eardrum. A few questions he wants to ask you. He’s coming right in, and the way he sounded he’ll really goose that Chevy. He’s been known to make it from Popes’ in seven minutes. Stick around.”

  “Tell him I’m sorry I missed him,” I said. I tapped my watch again. “Sometimes there aren’t enough hours in the day.”

  I started around a counter. Minturn cleared his throat. He must have signaled to Rusty, for the boy moved over in front of me.

  “And what is this?” I said, stopping.

  “A couple of questions, for God’s sake,” Minturn said. “You aren’t that busy.”

  “Boys, boys,” I said. “Go play with your fire engines.”

  Turning, I headed for Al. He took his thumbs out of his belt. He had developed those shoulders swinging a big shovel, but the mustache on his upper lip made me think that he might not care to be cut up in somebody else’s quarrel. I could have been right, but I never found out. Rusty stepped out of his Saturday Evening Post cover and clubbed me from behind.

  The store was full of hard objects he could have used, but he didn’t need to use anything except his fist. I went down on one knee. If there hadn’t been a counter to hold onto, I would have gone all the way. I shook my head. It didn’t fall off, so I pulled myself to my feet.

  “That’s the last time I buy any can-openers in this store,” I said.

  That, at least, was what I was trying to say, but the words bled into each other. Minturn said nervously, “What was that? Never mind, you’re not hurt. Get a chair for him, Al. The lieutenant wants us to keep him here so he can bounce his ass over the town line himself.”

  I heard that over the sound of the road-building machinery inside my head. “I thought he just wanted to ask me some questions.”

  “Well, you know—I was being diplomatic. I don’t want any trouble. A customer might walk in.”

  “This is the wrong way to go about avoiding trouble. What’s your first name? Joe?”

  “Yes.”

  “What I’m trying to figure out, Joe, and maybe you can tell me, is why would anybody go to the bank after coming back from a funeral? Why did you even think you had to go to the funeral? You can’t know the Popes that well. You’re not one of those people who like to listen to sad music. Does your brother know about all the driving around you did last night, all the people you met out on the roads? Or is he getting a cut?”

  I didn’t expect an answer and I didn’t get any. I was killing time until things were back in focus.

  Minturn’s store was running a sale on house paint that month, and a pyramid of gallon cans had been erected in an open space where two aisles came together. As soon as I was able to read the fine print on the labels I lurched away from the counter, staggered as though I was still feeling Rusty’s blow, and knocked over the pyramid.

  A customer came in from the street, a stout matron in Bermuda shorts, carrying a dachshund. Rusty and Al tried to kick aside the paint cans so they could get at me. More cans came down. I picked up a double handful of loose nuts and bolts and threw them at Rusty, then whirled and went for Minturn.

  He opened both arms, thinking only of blocking me from the door. I dived at his midsection. My outstretched fingers went into his stomach like a fork into a sausage. He went backward, and I hit him with a display of small tools, a rack of hinges and a basketball hoop. That was all I could reach.

  I vaulted onto the counter and kicked at Al’s head as he came up the aisle. The customer screamed and lost her dachshund, which leaped out of her arms and darted forward, yipping
sharply.

  Minturn grabbed at my leg and my foot came down on his hand. Rusty was still caught in the rolling cans. I took two rapid steps and went over the roll of wrapping paper at the end of the counter. Even without counting the customer and her low, excited dog, there were too many people in the store. I ran into a back room where bulkier objects were kept, things like garbage pails and trash burners. Coiled lengths of plastic garden hose hung from a long peg near the door. I grabbed the topmost coil. As Minturn charged through I dropped it over his head. I spun him around with a straightarm, bouncing him off the wall. While he was still vibrating I hit him with a left. I knew as it landed that I wouldn’t have to bother about this branch of the Minturn family for a while.

  I knocked over a stack of galvanized pails and made a tangle on top with wire and bamboo rakes. All this was helping relieve my nervous tension, but I knew that in a moment Al or Rusty would think of circling the building to get at me from the rear. The big double doors to the yard were open. I would have a clear run to my Buick.

  At that moment Rusty ran around the front of the store. I ducked back.

  I saw another door. In another moment I was in a covered gallery filled with sorted lumber. This brought me to a warehouse running parallel to the store. I pulled open a hanging door. Another door began to slide at the other end of the warehouse. I stepped back quickly and climbed a ladder to the second floor of the gallery, where there were long racks of moldings. Inside the warehouse on this level was the feed-loft, a kind of half-balcony. I climbed in through an open window.

  Al was in the doorway below me, looking cautiously around. He was carrying a baseball bat. I checked the windows overlooking the yards. There were three. A truck loaded with pea-coal was parked beneath the third. I opened that window, listening to Al poking around among sacks of dry plaster and cement on the ground floor.

  “Come out, come out, wherever you are,” he called.

  In the last minute or two things had been happening fast, but now I slowed down. I gauged the drop to the coal truck and decided I could make it. I waited till my breathing was more or less normal. I could hear Al working his way diagonally across the warehouse floor toward the steps to the left. I picked out a fifty-pound sack of grain and dragged it to the stair-opening, a simple rectangle cut into the loft floor. Al would have heard me if he hadn’t been making so much noise of his own.